May 26, 2010

Architectural face-off: Chicago puts Philadelphia on ice, but don't go trashing Philly--our architects designed many of its icons

There is a long tradition in journalism when your hometown team is playing for a championship. You good-naturedly trash everything about the other city.

According to that playbook, with the Blackhawks about to face off against the Philadelphia Flyers for the Stanley Cup, I should be proclaiming Chicago’s superiority in architecture. And frankly, that would not be difficult, given the city’s long record of leadership in everything from skyscrapers to city planning. When BusinessWeek rated America’s top design cities in 2008, Chicago ranked first, with Philly (its skyline above) rated ninth.

But I’m not going down that road, and there are two big reasons why.

First, the Blackhawks’ home arena, the United Center (left), is nothing to brag about. It’s just another corporate sports palace, a pale echo of the stirring Art Deco classicism at the legendary but long-gone Chicago Stadium. The Flyers’ Wachovia Center (below) at least makes a stab at bracing, contemporary design. It’s also easily reached by public transit, and some fans claim it’s a more intimate place to take in the action.

Second, as I discovered during a recent visit to Philadelphia, many of that city’s iconic metropolitan images have a distinctly familiar feel: They were created, it turns out, in the drafting rooms of Chicago. Trashing Philly would be like trashing ourselves.

When the television cameras pan the Philadelphia skyline before the series’ first game there next Wednesday night, they will invariably settle on One and Two Liberty Place, Helmut Jahn’s Chrysler Building-inspired exercises in postmodernism, with their bright blue glass, sculpted tops and an exultant spire crowning One Liberty Place (left).

Finished in 1987, the taller One Liberty Place shattered the anachronistic “gentleman’s agreement” that for decades ensured that no building in the city rise would higher than the statue of William Penn atop the ornate tower of Philadelphia’s City Hall.

Philadelphians continue to appreciate the Liberty Place duo, even though postmodernism — po-mo for short — fell out of fashion years ago.

“Philly is so retrograde that people still like po-mo,” e-mailed my colleague at The Philadelphia Inquirer, architecture critic Inga Saffron.

Liberty Place is simply the most obvious example of Chicago’s imprint on the city of Ben Franklin and Rocky Balboa.

D.H. Burnham & Co., the firm led by Chicago’s Daniel Burnham, designed Philadelphia’s great John Wanamaker’s department store (1911), an East Coast sibling of the former Marshall Field’s on State Street. As at Field’s, an austere classical exterior gives way to inner glory, a five-story atrium (left) topped by a vaulted mosaic ceiling. The atrium also includes a big pipe organ. Like Field’s, Wanamaker’s is now part of the Macy’s empire.

The Burnham firm also designed Philly’s handsome Land Title buildings (1897 and 1902), two muscular Chicago-style skyscrapers that rise side-by-side on Philadelphia’s main drag (a historic postcard view of them is at the bottom of this post).

It’s “as though a bit of Chicago’s South Michigan Avenue was transplanted to Broad Street,” Francis Morrone wrote in his 1999 guidebook to Philadelphia’s architecture.

Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, the firm that succeeded D.H. Burnham & Co., turned out Philadelphia’s two main train stations--Suburban Station (1929), which is stuck in the basement of an otherwise handsome office building, and 30th Street Station (1934), which shelters an Art Deco main concourse (left) that ranks with New York’s Grand Central Terminal as a magnificent urban gateway.

In recent years, Chicago’s Solomon Cordwell Buenz has made a lively departure from Philly’s stodgy reliance on brick for domestic architecture, bringing glassy modernism to the city with such praiseworthy condo towers as the blue-and-white, curving-walled Murano (below).

And what, one might ask, has Philly contributed to Chicago’s architecture?

Not much in actual construction, but something quite significant nonetheless.

In the summer of 1873, while still learning his craft, Louis Sullivan, that future hero of Chicago architecture, worked in the office of Philadelphia’s Frank Furness, the red-bearded, sharp-tongued genius who designed such idiosyncratic, Victorian-era masterworks as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (below).

It was in Furness’ office, according to Sullivan biographer Robert Twombly, that key aspects of Sullivan’s mature style had their origins: a preference for bold building forms, colorful “polychromatic” decoration and nature-inspired ornament.

So the next time you walk by Sullivan’s masterful former Carson, Pirie Scott & Co. store at State and Madison Streets--with its structurally-expressive, white cellular walls and its forest-green, cast-iron ornament sweeping around the corner--give Philly a well-deserved tip of the hat.

And that, of course, will be a Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup championship hat.

Posted at 12:01:00 AM

Comments

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Sullivan worked for Frank Furness? That's my "learn something new" du jour! Thanks for that. "Frank's Banks" in Philly are a must see for any architecture fan.

is this how they "good-naturedly trash" people over there in chi city?

BK: If I had really wanted to talk some trash, I would have mentioned what Philly fans called the Wachovia Center when it was known as the First Union Center. The "F.U. Center." Sweet.

Or I would have mentioned the anti-gay lunacy on crossingbroad.com, which says (wrongly) that I tried to trash Philly architecture. The writer of that blog should get a clue--and go back into his cave.

Interesting comments over at crossingbroad. Seems that they don't have an appreciation for architecture, theirs especially. Since when does discussing the origins of a building constitute an insult? Stay classy Philadelphia.

We do have an Apple Store on Michigan Avenue designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, a Philly based firm. We also have 200 South Michigan Avenue by William Lescaze - not one of his better works, imo - it is only a footnote with postage stamp photo in the one monograph I have of him.

Nothing by Venturi. Nothing by Mitchel/Guirgola. Sadly, Nothing by Kahn or Furness.

I guess that could amount to "not much"

BK: Not much indeed, and it's even unclear which BCJ office did the Michigan Avenue Apple store. It could have been one of the three in Pennsylvania (Philly, Pittsburgh, or Wilkes-Barre). Or San Francisco or Seattle. When I reviewed it, there was no mention of the Philly office.

@ Chris | May 26, 2010 at 01:51 PM: The Declaration of Independence was written in Philly, by a Virginain. The Constitution was written by a Virginian and a New Jerseyian, brokered by a Connecticut rep (The Great Compromise). All people who were guests of Philly, not sons or Reps of Penn.

Independence hall is a great place, but merely for it's historical value, not necessarily for it's architectural value.